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Comment by uhhhhhhh | Hacker News Reader

Wow, that's short sighted.

Force streaming services to release in French theaters, force customers to pay someone else to watch the movie, and subject the streaming services to draconian french regulations on when they can stream that movie.

So as Netflix, Amazon, and other streaming services take off, cannes will become less and less relevant as more and more movies are funded and produced by streaming services until cannes is that old french indy festival that was replaced with a more modern and movie viewer friendly festival.

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AFAIK the Academy Awards have a similar rule - a movie must have a cinema release before it can be considered for nomination. (More specifically, a run for at least seven days in a Los Angeles County theater!)

Made-for-TV movies have their own competition and awards, like the Emmy awards.

I don't see how this will make Cannes less relevant. It doesn't make Cannes less relevant that it doesn't award daytime soaps or commercials or whatever. Focus on a specific niche - cinematic movies - arguably will help it stay relevant, as long as cinemas exists.

(Whether cinemas will continue to exist is a different question. I suspect Netflix is a much larger threat to traditional flow TV than to cinemas.)

In any case, Cannes is not "forcing" anybody to do anything. They are just clarifying what kind of movies can be considered for the festival.

But your assertion there is that made-for-TV (or made-for-Netflix, or whatever follows) movies intrinsically have less value. You're saying a movie can only really be "cinematic" if it comes out in a cinema.

That's exactly the nonsense we're talking about here.

Distribution channel doesn't mean anything. There are strong correlations between being able to put on a show and production values, but it's not causative.

Define a movie by its actual qualities. Runtime, dialogue(?), even picture format... But forget about distribution. Lots of people have cinemas in their houses now. Where they don't have to pay £30 to be surrounded by sweaty strangers and sit on uncomfortable and dirty seats. Plus snacks and transport.

Where do you get "less value"? They are just delimiting what kinds of movies the will considered for their festival. The Academy Awards also have certain restrictions on the picture format in place to prevent straight-to-video movies from consideration.

If you don't like going to the cinema, why do you care about Cannes at all? It is a film festival which celebrate cinema and the associated mystique and glamour. Nobody is preventing you from watching whatever you want in your home cinema.

You're saying only movies shown in a cinema can be cinematic. That's the value you're discounting.

Again, I think you need to separate the building from the art.

Never mind the word "cinematic", the point is the festival and similar movie awards have a certain definition for what kind of moving picture entertainment they consider eligible for their awards. The definition includes that the general public should be able to go to a cinema and buy a ticket to see the movie on a big screen.

That's not saying other forms of entertainment cannot have value, just that Cannes is about a certain form.

I don't disagree that that's their definition. I wish you'd stop repeating it. It's that definition that's so stupid.

Conflating "form" with distribution as if the latter affects the first.

No, I'll give you a chance... But how do you think they review these things? It used to be DVD screeners but (ironically, here) Cannes set up an online VOD service for screeners. How do you assess something that has to be available via cinemas, on computer via a wonky streaming service?

This rule is simple (and classic French) protectionism of a distribution channel that is failing to compete.

It is a film festival for cineastes - film lovers or film snobs if you will. Its whole culture. For them there is a big difference between the big-screen cinema experience and watching home video. It is certainly a bigger difference than just the means of distribution.

I think it was David Lynch who said "If you haven't see my movies in a cinema, then you haven't seen my movies".

You may not care for this difference, but why does it anger you so that others do?

For a recent example of this see "Red Pill", a documentary about the Men's Rights movement.

They were backed via Kickstarter and promised backers a "pre-release" download. Because they wanted to be eligible for an Academy Award nomination they ended up releasing the movie in LA (and New York I think?) for the minimum run necessary and then waited another couple of months for the official release as digital download.

Because of the Academy Award rules they held back the "pre-release" downloads until just before the release of the digital download version. They angered a lot of backers by saying it was still technically a pre-release because the digital download hadn't been available yet although the film had already been in cinemas and available for private screenings for months at that point.

It's a good example for bad communication. Especially when upset backers were basically told the "pre-release" would happen at the last possible moment to combat file sharing, but that's another tangent.

That was just bad execution. The Academy Awards only requires that a film be screened for at least 2 weeks in LA and that it not be available for streaming prior to the screening window, however concurrent streaming is acceptable. (Straight from the horse's mouth: http://www.oscars.org/sites/oscars/files/89th-general_entry_...) For example, Netflix' Beasts of No Nation was available for streaming the same day as its premiere in LA and was eligible for Oscars, though it was not nominated for any.

French cinema's current position in the world is mainly due to these kinds of stricts regulations, that allow small films to compete with big budget movies for the viewers' attention, and small theaters with big networks. Netflix, iTunes etc. are not just "normal" players in the film production business, they are also marketplaces fighting for distribution exclusivity, and they need to be regulated as such.

As a french, I can tell you that what's french regulations are protecting is mostly garbage nobody wants to watch. For one "Amelie", you have a 1000 "les petits mouchoirs". Well I don't want my taxes to pay to protect those. Let the market decide. I already pay 13 euros for a freaking movie while I paid 5 times less 20 years ago. Netflix provides way better content than the french industry. French youtubers produce way better content that the traditional french medias. The independant scene, only getting scraps from this so called "cinema protection" does more creative content.

Let the dinausores die please.

"Amélie" is by no means a small film, just take a look at Jean-Pierre Jeunet's other films' budget to get a sense of it. By small films I mean for example : - Sayônara by Kôji Fukada - Un avant-poste du progrès by Hugo Vieira da Silva - Psiconautas by Pedro Rivero and Alberto Vázquez Those are just 3 titles coming up from Allocine that launched this week in theaters. None of them will be on Netflix. Regarding the ticket price, it's indeed around 11-13 in big circuits, but around 7 in small independant theaters, so that's a reason more to encourage them.

I never meant it was a small film.

Fair enough; my point about the visibility of small foreign films in theaters vs on Netflix still stands though.

Ticket prices in Europe are not too far from that, especially if you're talking about Paris

> Well I don't want my taxes to pay to protect those. Let the market decide.

Taxes?? This is what the Cannes festival decided, not your government.

> Netflix provides way better content than the french industry.

Then watch Netflix? Your government is not stopping you.

I suspect France has a similar system whereby the gov has essentially a tax for financing/subsidizing the film industry and that's what they're talking about.

Btw: in GER it's ~17.50€ per month per household and the "agency" collecting this money is already talking about raising this to ~20€ in a few years...

Ref: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beitragsservice_von_ARD,_ZDF...

Exactly. Most french movies make pennies at the box office and the only reason they exist is because of outrageous financing by the State. Same thing happens in other like minded countries in Europe.

Spain here, can confirm. Some producers even fake the mandatory movie screening that they need to keep the tax-funded grant. Even the freaking former president of the Spanish Cinema Academy is facing jail time over this: http://www.elconfidencial.com/cultura/2017-03-02/la-fiscalia...

An important distinction is that the money does not come out of your paycheck. Instead, they take 10% of what you pay on cinema tickets (including foreign movies).

You could argue that french studios also get tax breaks, but those don't actually fund movies, they just increase profits for movies that are profitable.

As a fellow Frenchman I agree. Now don't get me wrong, I am for high taxes, high social safety nets, public universities, public healthcare, and even public maintenance of the arts. I am also for public money helping promote French culture and language. But the way French cinema is incentivised is a scam on the public, it just contributes to old dinosaurs putting out garbage movies to put money in the pocket of the same big name French actors, and taking a cut in the process to fill their own pockets. I would prefer that that money was put up in the form of investment for independent filmmakers, or just diverted towards our crumbling universities.

What does it mean to be for "high taxes"? I'm for the government taxing enough to pay for whatever services it's offering but that should be as low as possible.

Governments are an extreme example of any other bureaucracy. They always find a way to spend every dollar they're collecting and usually more than that too.

I see what you mean, I expressed myself badly. Obviously the government should not be wasting the money it is collecting, and they should be taxing just enough so that they can fund the services they offer. What I mean is that I am not for cutting the number of those services just for the sake of saving a few euros.

How magnanimous! Such a generous heart.

The problem with socialism is, you eventually run out of other people's money.

Swinging things back to startups, apparently that's the problem with a lot of SV business models as well.

"You're losing money on every order?!"

"Sure but we make it up in volume!"

I'm sorry, I can't hear you, the sound of the US administrations declaring bankruptcy is too loud.

How does the social ownership of means of production even relate to what we are talking about? Or are you referring to social policies in general? In which case there are multiple models of market-based socialism, in which social benefits (public healthcare, public education, public transport, government-subsidized housing) are used to boost individuals' purchasing power (they are healthy, they can work better jobs, they can be more flexible with where they live) and inject that money into the economy by keeping a happy, healthy and educated population.

Cannes isn't forcing anyone to do anything. Relax. There is still an audience for theatre releases so Cannes will be fine and so will Netflix.

As a french I strongly disagree that Netflix or Amazon provide a viewer friendly movie viewing experience. You are forced into a subscription that provides little to no value because their library is really small in France (for movies).

As for the regulations I agree that they are too strict for the digital age but not releasing in the theaters is a pretty bad solution IMO.

I agree, it is a similar situation in most European countries atm. However, the fact that the service is not great now should not be taken as an indication that the service cannot be great in the future.

If you look at the US market, both providers have significant amounts of content, which, it can be argued, provides a better viewing experience. The trend seems to be going away from traditional cinemas to streaming services. If this is the case Cannes may have just made itself irrelevant to this growing part of the market.

what the difference between a movie on netflix and movie shot with my buddies and put on youtube.

I don't know. What's the difference between a movie produced by a Hollywood studio and a movie produced by you and your buddies on a shoestring budget?

One million $ was wasted in croissant and baguette.

Quality of product are not determined by the amount of money wasted. Sure the base quality is almost here, but it's why we have sooooo many bad movies but 1% of them are good.

When you get a movie (https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleon_Dynamite) for $ 6,000 that make 40 million, done in 27 days. Hollywood studio should stop scratching their balls.

Cannes losing relevancy is nothIng new. it was already old fashioned 20 years ago.

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